The migration of the aura

or how to explore
the original through its fac similes*
A chapter prepared by Bruno Latour & Adam Lowe
for Thomas Bartscherer (editor) Switching Codes, University of Chicago Press
(2010)
Final version after editing by CUP
To Pasquale Gagliardi

* We thank the participants at the dialog held in Venice in San Giorgio on Inheriting
the Past for many useful conversatins and especially the director of the Cini
Foundation, Pasquale Gagliardi.

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Something odd has happened to Holbein's Ambassadors at the National Gallery

in London. The visitor does not immediately know how to describe her malaise.
The painting is completely flat; its colors bright but somewhat garish; the shape of
every object is still there but slightly exaggerated; she wonders what has happened
to this favorite painting of hers. "That's it," she mutters, "The painting has lost its
depth; the fluid dynamics of the paint has gone. It is just a surface now." But, what
does this surface look like? The visitor looks around, puzzled, and, then, the
answer dawns on her: it resembles almost exactly the poster she bought several
years ago at the Gallery bookshop, and that still hangs in her study at home. Only
the dimension differs.
Could it be true? She wonders. Could they have replaced the Ambassadors by
a fac simile? Maybe it's on loan to some other museums, and, so as to not
disappoint the visitors, they put up with this copy. Or maybe they did not want to
trick us, and it is a projection. It is so flat and bright that it could almost be a slide
projected on a screen Fortunately, she composes herself enough to not ask the
stern guard in the room whether this most famous painting is the original or not.
What a shock it would have been. Unfortunately, she knows enough about the
strange customs of restorers and curators to bow to the fact that this is, indeed, the
original although only in name, that the real original has been irreversibly lost and
that it has been substituted by what most people like in a copy: bright colors,
shining surface, and above all a perfect resemblance with the slides sold at the
bookshop that are shown in art classes all over the world by art teachers most
often interested only in the shape and theme of a painting but not by any other
marks registered in the thick surface of a work. She leaves the room suppressing a
tear: the original has been turned into a copy of itself looking like a cheap copy, and no
one seems to complain, or even to notice, the substitution. They seem happy to
have visited in London the original poster of Holbein's Ambassadors!
Something even stranger happened to her, some time later, in the Salle de
la Joconde in Le Louvre. To finally get at this cult icon of the Da Vinci code,
hundreds of thousands of visitors have to enter through two doors that are
separated by a huge framed painting, Veronese's Nozze di Cana, a rather dark giant
of a piece that directly faces the tiny Mona Lisa, barely visible through her thick
anti-fanatic glass. Now the visitor is really stunned. In the Hollywood machinery
of the miraculous wedding, she no longer recognizes the fac simile that she had the
good fortune of seeing at the end of 2007 when she was invited by the Fondazione
Cini to the island of San Giorgio, in Venice. There it was, she remembers vividly,
a painting on canvas, so thick and deep that you could still see the brush marks of
Veronese and feel the sharp cuts that Napoleon's orderlies had to make in order to
tear the painting from the wall, strip by strip, before rolling it like a carpet and
sending it as a war booty to Paris in 1797 a cultural rape very much in the
mind of all Venetians, up to this day. But there, in Palladio's refectory, the
painting (yes, it was a painting even though it was produced through the
intermediary of digital techniques) had an altogether different meaning: it was
mounted at a different height, one that makes sense in a dining room; it was
delicately lit by the natural light of huge East and West windows so that at about
5pm on a summer afternoon the light in the room exactly coincides with the light

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in the painting; it had, of course, no frame; and, more importantly, Palladio's

architecture merged with admirable continuity within Veronese's painted
architecture giving this refectory of the Benedictine monks such a trompe l'oeil depth
of vision that you could not stop yourself from walking slowly back and forth and
up and down the room to enter deeper and deeper into the mystery of the miracle
[see the photo essay].
But here, in the Mona Lisa room, even though every part of the painting
looked just the same (as far as she could remember), the meaning of the painting
she had seen in Venice seemed entirely lost. Why does it have such a huge gilt
frame? Why are there doors on both sides? Why is it hanging so low, making a
mockery of the Venetian balcony on which the guests were crowding ? The bride
and groom, squashed into the left hand corner, seemed peripheral here, while in
Venice, they were of great importance, articulating a scene of sexual intrigue that
felt like a still from a film. In Paris, the composition made less sense. Why this ugly
zenithal light? Why this air conditioned room with its dung brown polished plaster
walls? In Venice, there was no air-conditioning; the painting was allowed to
breathe by itself as if Veronese had just left it to dry. And, anyway, the visitors
could not move around the painting to ponder those questions without bumping
into others momentarily glued (queued) to the Joconde turning their backs to the
Veronese.
A terrible cognitive dissonance. And yet there was no doubt that this one,
in Paris, was the original; no substitution had occurred, no cheating of any sort -with all its restoration Veronese would certainly be surprised to see the painting
looking as it does, but that's different from cheating. She remembered perfectly
well that in Venice it was clearly written: "A facsimile". And in San Giorgio there
was even a small exhibition to explain in some detail the complex digital processes
that Factum Arte, the workshop in Madrid, had used to de- then re-materialize
the gigantic Parisian painting, carefully laser scanning it, A4 by A4,
photographing it in similarly sized sections, white light scanning it to record the
relief surface, and then somehow managing to stitch together the digital files
before instructing a purpose-built printer to deposit pigments onto a canvas
carefully coated with a gesso almost identical to that used by Veronese. Is it
possible that the Venice version, although it clearly states that it is a facsimile, is
actually more original than the Paris original, she wonders? She now remembers that
on the phone with a French art historian friend, she had been castigated for
spending so much time in San Giorgio with the copy of the Nozze: "Why waste
your time with a fake Veronese, when there are so many true ones in Venice?!"
her friend had said, to which she had replied, without realizing what she was
saying: "But come here to see it for yourself, no description can replace seeing this
original oops, I mean, is this not the very definition of 'aura'?". Without
question, for her, the aura of the original had migrated from Le Louvre to San
Giorgio: the best proof was that you had to come to the original and see it. What a
dramatic contrast, she thought, between the Veronese and the Ambassadors, which
claims to be the original in order to hide the fact that it is an expensive copy of one
of its cheap copies!

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"But it's not the original, it's just a facsimile!" How often have we heard such a
retort when confronted with an otherwise perfect reproduction of a painting? No
question about it, the obsession of the age is for the original version. Only the
original possesses an aura, this mysterious and mystical quality that no second
hand version will ever get. But paradoxically, this obsession for pinpointing
originality increases proportionally with the availability and accessibility of more
and more copies of better and better quality. If so much energy is devoted to the
search for the original for archeological and marketing reasons it is because
the possibility of making copies has never been so open-ended. If no copies of the
Mona Lisa existed would we pursue it with such energy and, would we devise so
many conspiracy theories to decide whether or not the version held under glass
and protected by sophisticated alarms is the original surface painted by Leonardo's
hand or not. In other words, the intensity of the search for the original depends on
the amount of passion and the number of interests triggered by its copies. No
copies, no original. In order to stamp a piece with the mark of originality, you
need to apply to its surface the huge pressure that only a great number of
reproductions can provide.
So, in spite of the knee-jerk reaction "But this is just a facsimile", we
should refuse to decide too quickly when considering the value of either the
original or its reproduction. Thus, the real phenomenon to be accounted for is not
the punctual delineation of one version divorced from the rest of its copies, but the
whole assemblage made up of one or several original(s) together with the retinue
of its continually re-written biography. It is not a case of "either or" but of "and,
and". Is it not because the Nile ends up in such a huge delta that the century-old
search for its sources had been so thrilling? To pursue the metaphor, we want, in
this paper, to behave like hydrographers intent in deploying the whole catchment
area of a river, not only focusing on an original spring. A given work of art should
be compared not to any isolated locus but to a river's catchment, complete with its
estuaries, its many tributaries, its dramatic rapids, its many meandering turns and,
of course, also, its several hidden sources.
To give a name to this catchment area, we will use the word trajectory. A
work of art no matter of which material it is made has a trajectory or, to use
another expression popularized by anthropologists, a career.1 What we want to do
in this paper is to specify the trajectory or career of a work of art and to move
from one question that we find moot ("Is it an original or merely a copy?") to
another one that we take to be decisive, especially at the time of digital
reproduction: "Is it well or badly reproduced?" The reason why we find this second
question so important is because the quality, conservation, continuation,
sustenance and appropriation of the original depends entirely on the distinction
between good and bad reproduction. We want to argue that a badly reproduced
original risks disappearing while a well accounted for original may continue to
enhance its originality and to trigger new copies. This is why we want to show that
1 Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things. Commodities in Cultural Perspective.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986; Tamen, Miguel. Friends of Interpretable
Objects. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2001.

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facsimiles, especially those relying on complex (digital) techniques, are the most
fruitful way to explore the original and even to help re-define what originality
actually is.
To shift the attention of the reader away from the detection of the original
to that of the quality of its reproduction, let us remember that the word "copy"
does not need to be so derogatory, since it comes from the same etymology as
"copious," and thus designates a source of abundance. There is nothing inferior in
the notion of a copy, simply a proof of fecundity. Is originality something that is
fecund enough to produce an abundance of copies? So much so that, in order to
give a first shape to the abstract notion of the trajectory, we wish to call upon the
antique emblem of a cornucopia: a twisted goat horn with a sharp end the
original and a wide mouth disgorging at will an endless flow of riches (all thanks
to Zeus). Actually, this connection between the idea of copies and that of the
original should come as no surprise, since for a work of art to be original means
nothing but to be the origin of a long lineage. Something which has no progeny, no
reproduction, and no inheritors is not called original but rather sterile or barren.
To the question: "Is this isolated piece an original or a facsimile?," it might be
more interesting to ask: "Is this segment in the trajectory of the work of art barren
or fertile?".
To say that a work of art grows in originality thanks to the quality and
abundance of its copies, is nothing odd: this is true of the trajectory of any set of
interpretations. If the songs of the Iliad had remained stuck in one little village of
Asia Minor, Homer would not be considered as a (collective) author of such great
originality. It is because and not in spiteof the thousands and thousands of
repetitions and variations of the songs that, when considering any copy of the Iliad,
we are moved so much by the unlimited fecundity of the original. We attribute to
the author (even though his very existence cannot be specified) the power of each
of the successive reinterpretations by saying that "potentially" all of them "were
already" there in the Ur-text which we simultaneously know to be wrong (my
reading could not possibly be already there in Greece) and perfectly right since I
willingly add my little expansion to the "unlimited" fecundity of this collective
phenomenon called "The Iliad." If it is so unlimited, it is because I push the limit a
little bit more. This does mean that there is nothing "inherently great" in the first
versions of the great poem, and that to penetrate inside this inherent greatness, you
need to bring with you all of the successive versions, adaptations and
accommodations. Nothing is more ordinary than this mechanism: Abraham has
become the father of a people "as numerous as the grains of sand" only because he
had a lineage. Before the birth of Isaac, Abraham was a despised, barren old man.
That he became "the Father of three religions" is a result of what happened to
Isaac, and, subsequently, what happened to every one of his later sons and
daughters. Such is the "awesome responsibility" of the reader, as Charles Pguy so
eloquently said, because this process is entirely reversible; "if we stop interpreting,

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if we stop rehearsing, if we stop reproducing, the very existence of the original is at

stake. It might stop having abundant copies and slowly disappear."2
We have no difficulty raising questions about the quality of the entire
trajectory when dealing with the performing arts, such as dance, music and theatre.
Why is it so difficult when faced with the reproduction of a painting, a piece of
furniture, a building or a sculpture? This is the first question we want to clarify.
No one will complain on hearing King Lear: "But this is not the original, it is
just a representation!". Quite right. That's the whole idea of what it is to play King
Lear: it is to replay it. In the case of a performance, everyone is ready to take into
account the whole trajectory going from the first presentations through the long
successions of its "revivals" all the way to the present. There is nothing
extraordinary in considering that "one good representation of King Lear" is a
moment, a segment, in the career of the work of art called King Lear, the absolute
Platonic ideal of which no one has ever seen and no one will ever be able to
circumscribe. In addition, it requires no great sophistication to be fully prepared
for disappointment at not finding "the" first, original presentation by Shakespeare
"himself", but several premieres and several dozen different versions of the written
play with endless glosses and variations. We seem perfectly happy to be excited by
the anticlimactic discovery of the source of a major river in a humble spring barely
visible under the mossy grass. Third, and even more importantly, spectators have
no qualm whatsoever at judging the new version under their eyes by applying the
shibboleth: "Is it well or badly (re)played?" They can differ wildly in their opinions,
some being scandalized by what they take as some revolting novelties ("Why does
Lear disappear in a submarine?") or bored by the repetition of too many clichs,
but they have no difficulty in considering that this moment in the whole career of
all the successive King Lears in the plural should be judged on its merit and not
by its mimetic comparison with the first (entirely inaccessible anyway) presentation
of King Lear by the Shakespeare company in such and such a year. It is what we see
now under our eyes on stage that counts in making our judgment, and certainly
not the degree of resemblance with another Ur-event hidden from view (even
though what we take to be the real "King Lear" remains in the background of every
one of our judgments). So, clearly, in the case of performance art at least, every
new version runs the risk of losing the original or of regaining it.
So free are we from the comparison with any "original", that it is perfectly
acceptable to evaluate a replay by saying: "I would never have anticipated this; it
is totally different from the way it has been played before; it is utterly distinct from
the way Shakespeare played it, and yet I now understand what the play has always
been about!" Everything happens as if some of revivals the good ones had
managed to dig out of the original novel traits that might have been potentially in
the source, but that have remained invisible until now and are made vivid again to
the mind of the spectators. So, even though it is not evaluated by its mimetic
resemblance to an ideal exemplar, yet it is clear, and everyone might agree, that,
2 See the commentaries of Pguy in Deleuze, Gilles. Difference and Repetition (translated by
Paul Patton). New York: continuum International Publishing, 2005.

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because of the action of one of its late successors, the genius of Shakespeare has
gained a new level of originality because of the amazing feat of this faithful (but not
mimetic) reproduction. The origin is there anew, even though it is so different
from what it was. And the same phenomenon would occur for any piece of music
or dance. The exclamation: "It's so original" attributed to a new performance does
not describe one section along the trajectory (and especially not the first Urversion) but the degree of fecundity of the whole cornucopia. In performance art, the aura
keeps migrating and might very well come back suddenly or disappear
altogether. When so many bad repetitions have so decreased the level of fecundity
of the work that the original itself might be abandoned, it will stop being the
starting point of any succession. Such a work of art dies out like a family line
without any lineage. Like a river deprived of its tributaries one by one until it has
shrunk to the size of a tiny rivulet, the work has been reduced to its "original" size,
that is, to very little, since it has never been copiously copied, that is, constantly
reinterpreted and recast. The work has lost its aura for good.
Why is it so difficult to say the same thing and use the same type of
judgment for a painting or a sculpture or a building? Why not say, for instance,
that the facsimile of Veronese's "Nozze di Cana" has been replayed, rehearsed,
revived thanks to a new interpretation in Venice in 2007 by Factum Arte, much as
Hector Berlioz's Les Troyens had been given at last for the first time in London by
Colin Davis in 1969 in Covent Garden (a feat that poor Berlioz never managed to
witness since he never had the money nor the orchestra to play his original work
in full). And yet, what seems so easy for performance art remains far fetched for
the visual arts. If we claim that the Nozze di Cana has been "given again" in San
Giorgio, someone will immediately say: "But the original is in Paris! The one now
in San Giorgio is just a facsimile!" A sense of fakery, counterfeiting or betrayal, has
been introduced into the discussion in a way that would seem absurd for a piece of
performance art (even though it is perfectly possible to say of a very bad company
that it made "a sham" at playing Shakespeare). It seems almost impossible to say
that the facsimile of Veronese's Nozze di Cana is not about falsification but it is a
stage in the verification of Veronese's achievement, a part of its ongoing
biography.
One reason for this unequal treatment obviously has to do with what could
be called the differential of resistance among all segments of the trajectory. In his
much too famous essay, throughout a deep fog of art historical mysticism, it is this
gap in technology that Walter Benjamin pointed out under the name of
"mechanical reproduction."3 In the case of performance art, each version is just as
difficult to produce, and just as costly, as the former one (actually more and more
expensive as time goes on and certainly more than in Shakespeare's timejust
think of the wages for the security guards and all the health and safety standards!).
It is not because there have been zillions of representations of King Lear that the
one you are now going to give will be easier to fund. The marginal cost will be
exactly the same with the only exception that the public will know what "a King
Lear" is, coming fully equipped with endless presuppositions and critical tests
3 Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In
Illuminations, 217-51. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.

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concerning how it should be played (a double-edged sword, as any director

knows). This is the technical reason why, in the case of performance art, we don't
distinguish between an original and a copy, but rather between successive versions
of the same play each designated by the label "version n", "version n+1", "version
n+2", etc. It is also why the real play "King Lear" is localized nowhere specifically
(and often not at the very beginning) but is rather the name given to the whole
cornucopia itself (even though each spectator may cherish those special moments
in his or her personal history when, because of an exceptionally good "revival",
the genius of the real King Lear has been "instantiated" more fully than any time
before or later). In those cases, the trajectory is composed of segments made, so to
speak, of the same stuff or that at least require a roughly similar mobilization of
resources.
The situation appears to be entirely different when considering, for
instance, a painting. Because it remains in the same frame, encoded in the same
pigments, entrusted to the same institution, one cannot help having the impression
that every reproduction will be so much easier to do and that there will be no
possible comparison of quality between the various segments of the trajectory.
This is why the aura seems definitely attached to one version only: the autograph
one. And certainly this is superficially true: if you take a picture of the Nozze di
Cana in Paris with your digital camera, no one in his right mind can render
commensurable the pale rendering on the screen of your computer and the 67m2
of canvas in le Louvre If you claimed that your picture was "just as good as the
original", people would raise their shoulders in pity, and rightly so.
And yet, the distance between "version n" called "the original" and
"version n+1" called "a mere copy" depends just as much on the differential of
efforts, of costs, of techniques as on any substantial distinction between the
successive versions of the same painting. In other words, it is not because of some
inherent quality of painting that we tend to create such a yawning gap between
originals and copies it is not because paintings are more "material" (an opera or
a play is just as "material" as pigments on canvas), but because of the differences
in the techniques used for each segment of the trajectory. While in performance
art, they are grossly homogeneous (each replay relying on the same gamut of
techniques) the career of a painting or a sculpture relies on segments which are
vastly heterogeneous and which vary greatly in the intensity of the efforts deployed
along its path. It is this asymmetry, we wish to argue, that too often preclude one
from saying that the Nozze di Cana in Paris has been "reprinted" or "given again"
in Venice. And it is certainly this presupposition that so angered the French art
historian who castigated her friend for wasting her time in San Giorgio instead of
visiting the "genuine Veroneses". Hidden behind the commonsense distinction
between original and mere copies lies a totally different process that has to do with
the technical equipment, the amount of care, and the intensity of the search for
the originality that goes from one version to the next. Before being able to defend
itself for re-enacting the original well or badly, a facsimile is discredited
beforehand because it is associated with a gap in techniques of reproduction, a gap
which is based on a misunderstanding of photography as an index of reality.

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The proof of this claim can be obtained by showing what happens to our
search for originality when we modify this differential something that becomes
easier and easier in the new digital age. That it is not limited to performance art
might be made clear by the comparison with the copying of manuscripts. Before
printing, the marginal cost of producing one more copy was exactly identical to
that of producing the penultimate one a situation to which we are actually
returning now with digital copies. Inside the scriptorium of a monastery, all
exemplars were themselves copies, and no copyist would have said that this one is
the original while this one is only a copy they were all facsimiles even though
great care was of course put into distinguishing a better, earlier, more illuminated
version from an inferior one. Here again, the aura was able to travel and might
very well have migrated to the newest and latest copy excellently done on one of
the best parchments and double checked against the best earlier sources.
Naturally, following the invention of the printing press, the marginal cost of one
extra copy became negligible compared to the time and techniques necessary to
write the manuscript; then, but then only, an enormous distance was introduced,
and rightly so, between one part of the trajectory the autograph manuscript
now turned into THE ORIGINAL and the print run which, from that
moment on, would be considered to consist of mere copies (until of course the
great art of bibliophily revealed endless subtle differences between each of the
successive prints and forensic digital analysis allowed us to date and order those
copies).
There is no better proof that the ability of the aura to be retrieved from the
flow of copies (or remain stuck in one segment of the trajectory) crucially depends
on the heterogeneity of the techniques used in the successive segments, than to
consider what happens to THE ORIGINAL book now that we are all sitting
inside that worldwide cut and paste scriptorium called the Web. Because there is
no longer any huge difference between the techniques used for each successive
reinstantiation of the originals of some segment of a hypertext, we accept quite
easily that no great distinction can be made between one version, judged before as
"the only original", and later versions, which would be said to be "mere copies".
We happily stamp successive renderings of the "same" argument with "version 1",
"version 2", "version n" while the notion of the author has become just as fuzzy as
that of the aura not to mention what happens to copyright royalities. Hence the
popularity of collective scriptoria like Wikipedia. In effect, Benjamin confused the
notion of "mechanical reproduction" with the inequality in the techniques
employed along a trajectory. No matter how mechanical a reproduction is, once
there is no huge gap in the process of production between version n and version
n+n, the clearcut distinction between the original and its reproduction becomes
less crucialand the aura begins to hesitate and is uncertain where it should land.
All of that might be very well, but is it possible to imagine the same
migration of the aura in the reproduction or the reinterpretation of, say, a
painting? After all, it is the contrast between the Nozze and the Ambassadors that
triggered our inquiry, which would have gone very differently had it been limited

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to performance art. One cannot help suspecting that there is in painting, in

architecture, in sculpture, in objects in general, a sort of stubborn persistence that
makes the association of a place, an original and some aura impossible to separate.
Let us first notice, however, that the difference between performance arts
and the others is not as radical as it seems: a painting has always to be reproduced, that
is, it is always a re-production of itself even when it appears to stay exactly the
same in the same place. Or, rather, no painting remains the same in the same
place without some reproduction. For paintings, too, existence precedes essence.
To have a continuing substance they need to be able to subsist. This requirement
is well known by curators all over the world: a painting has to be reframed, dusted,
sometimes restored, relit, and it has to be represented in different rooms with
different accompanying pictures, on different walls, inserted in different narratives,
with different catalogues, and with changes in its insurance value and price. So,
even though a painting might never be loaned, surviving inside the same
institutional setting without undergoing any heavy restoration, it has a career all
the same; to subsist and be visible again, it needs to be taken care of. The best
proof is that if you don't, it will soon be accumulating dust in a basement, be sold
for nothing, or will be cut into pieces and irremediably lost. Such is the
justification for all the restorations: if you don't do something, time will eat up that
painting as certainly as the building in which it is housed will decay, or as surely as
the institutions supposed to take care of it will start decomposing. If in doubt about
this, imagine your precious works of art housed in the Kabul National Museum.
For a work of art to survive, it requires an ecology just as complex as one needed
to maintain the natural character of a natural park.4
If the necessity of reproduction is accepted, then we might be able to
convince the reader that the really interesting question is not so much to
differentiate the original from the facsimiles, but to be able to tell apart the good
reproduction from the bad one. If the Ambassadors has been irreversibly erased, it is
not out of negligence, but, on the contrary, because of an excessive zeal in
"reproducing" it. What the curators did was to confuse the obvious general feature
of all works of art to survive they have to be somehow reproduced with the
narrow notion of reproduction provided by photographic posters while ignoring many other ways
for a painting to be reproduced. For instance, they could have had a perfect
facsimile registering all its surface effects in 3-D and restored the copy instead of
the work itself. If they had done this they could have invited several art historians
with different views to suggest different ways of restoring the copy and produced
an exhibition of the results. Their crime is not to have offered a reproduction of
the Holbein instead of the Holbein itself to the visitors of the National Gallery
"the Ambassadors" remains behind all the successive restorations much like King
Lear does over each of its replays, granting or withdrawing its auratic dimension at
will depending on the merit of each instance but to have so limited the range of
reproduction techniques that they have chosen one of the most barren one: the
photographas if a painting were not a thick material but some ethereal design
that could be lifted out of its materiality and downloaded into any reproduction
4 Western, David. In the Dust of Kilimandjaro
1997.

. New York: Shearwater/Island Press,

10

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without any loss of substance. Actually, a terribly revealing documentary shows

the culprits restoring the Holbein by using as their model photographs of the original
and subjectively deciding what was original, what had decayed, what had been
added, and imagining the painting as a series of discrete layers that can be added
or removed at willa process that resembles plastic surgery more than an open
forensic investigation.
Thus, what is so extraordinary in comparing the fate of the Ambassadors
with that of the Nozze is not that they both rely on reproduction this is a
necessity of existence but that the first relies on a notion of reproduction that
makes the original disappear for ever while the second adds originality to the
original version by offering it new dimensions without jeopardizing the penultimate
version without ever touching it, thanks to the delicate processes used to record
it.
But, one might ask, how could any originality be added? One obvious
answer is: by bringing the new version to its original location. The cognitive
dissonance undergone by the visitor in the Mona Lisa room comes in part from the
fact that in Palladio's refectory every single detail of the Nozze has a meaning
entirely lost and wasted in the awkward situation provided for the version n-1 in
Paris. In other words, originality does not come to a work of art in bulk; it is rather
made of different components, each of which can be inter-related to produce a
complex whole. New processes of reproduction allow us to see these elements and
their inter-relationship in new ways. To be at the place for which it had been
conceived in each and every detail is certainly one aspectone element in what
we mean by an original. Well, on that ground, there is no question that it is the
facsimile of the Nozze that is now original and that it is the version in Le Louvre
that has lost at least this comparative advantage.
We should not however be too mystical about the notion of an "original
location" in the case of the Veronese since the very refectory in which the
facsimile has been housed is itself a reconstruction. If you look at photographs
taken in 1950, you will notice that the original floor was gone and another had
been installed at the height of the windows. The top was a theatre and the
basement a wood workshop the whole space had been altered. It was rebuilt in
the 50's, but the plaster and floor were wrong and the boisserie that surrounded
the room and added the finishing touches to the proportion of the room was
missing. In its stripped down state, it looked more like a high protestant space that
almost seemed to laugh at the absence of Veronese's counter reformation flourish.
But now the effect of the facsimile is such that there are rumors that the return of
the painting has triggered a plan for a new restoration that will retrospectively
return the space to its former glory. A facsimile of a heavily restored original, now
in a new location, was causing new elements to be added to an original in its
original location that is in part a facsimile of itself. Originality once seemed so
simple
The same is certainly true of availability. What angered the visitor so much
in Le Louvre was that she could not actually scan visually the Nozze without
bumping into Mona Lisa addicts. The Veronese is so full of incident and detail that
it cannot be seen without time to contemplate its meaning, implications and the

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reasons for its continued importance. What does it mean to enshrine an original, if
the contemplation of its auratic quality is impossible? This, too, is another element
that can be prized away and distinguished from all the others. Actually, this
component of originality does not need to go with the originality of the location:
the best proof of this may lie in the facsimile of the burial chamber from the Tomb
of Thutmosis III in the Valley of the Kings.5 It contains the first complete text of
the Amduat to be used in a pharaonic tomb. The Amduat is a complex narrative
mixing art, poetry, science and religion to provide a coherent account of life in the
afterworld. The tomb was never made to be visited and the physical and climatic
conditions inside the tomb are incompatible with mass tourism. As a result, the
tomb is deterioriating rapidly and glass panels have had to be installed to protect
the walls from accidental damage and wear and tear. However, the interventions
in the tomb change its nature and inhibit both detailed study of the text and an
appreciation of the specific character of the place. Exhibitions that present the
facsimile and contextualize the text have now been visited by millions of people in
North America and Europe. The delocalized facsimile has established the reasons
for its continued importance, turned the visitors into a pro-active force in the
conservation of the tomb, and could become part of a long term policy that will
keep the version n-1 safe but accessible to the small number of specialists who
require access for continued study and monitoring. See? Each of the components
that together comprise what we mean by a true original begin traveling at
different speeds along the trajectory and begin to map out what we have called the
catchment area of a work of art.
A third element of originality has to do with the surface features of a work.
Too often, restorers make a mockery of the materiality of the original they claim
to protect by limiting matter to shape only because they confuse 3D with 2D. If
there is one aspect of reproduction that digital techniques have totally modified, it
is certainly the ability to register the most minute three dimensional aspect of a
work without putting the work at risk. It is often forgotten that in its early years the
British Museum used to take plaster casts of their objects and the first British
Museum catalogue contained a list of copies that were available and for sale. It is
often forgotten because the plaster cast collection was discarded at the end of the
20th century and valuable information about the surface of works when they
entered the museum was lost. Many of the moulds still contained the paint that
was removed during the casting process and subsequent restorations of the
originals have dramatically altered the surface and appearance of many of the
objects. So, even for a work of art to be material is a question of complex
trajectories. Many Venetians, when they first heard of the Nozze fac simile,
The facsimile of the tomb (in its current condition but without the elements that turn
the environment into a museum) has resulted in detailed publications by the egyptologist
Erik Hornung and the psychologist Theodor Abt in both film and book form.
Hornung, Erik and Abt, Theodor. The Dark Hours of the Sun -- The Amduat in the tomb of
Thutmose III, DVD, Pubished by Factum Arte , 2005
Hornung, Erik and others. Immortal Pharaoh- the tomb of Thutmose III. Madrid, Factum
Arte, 2006
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immediately conjured up in their mind a glossy flat surface much like that of a
poster, and they were horrified at the idea of being given this in reparation for
Napoleon's cultural rape of San Giorgio. Little could they anticipate that the
facsimile was actually in pigment on a canvas coated with gesso, "just like"
Veronese had used. When it was unveiled, there was a moment of silence, then
ecstatic applause and many tears. Large numbers of Venetians had to ask
themselves a very difficult question: how is it possible to have an aesthetic and
emotional response in front of a copy? This question is followed by another: how
do we stop Venice from being flooded with bad copies without the criteria to
distinguish between good and bad transformations?
Once again, digital techniques allow us to distinguish features that are
being regrouped much too quickly into the generic term "reproduction". As we
have seen, exactly the same intellectual oversimplifications and category mistakes
happened when Benjamin wrote about "mechanical reproduction". Surely the
issue is about accuracy, understanding and respect - the absence of which results
in "slavish" replication. The same digital techniques may be used either slavishly
or originally. It depends again on what features one chooses to bring into focus
and which ones are left out. The use of tiny painted dots based on photographs
rather than the broader brush marks used to make the original may give the
restorer more control and hide the interventions but surely it proves that a manual
reproduction might be infinitely more disputable and subjective than any
"mechanical" one. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
No doubt, it is an uphill battle: facsimiles have a bad reputation people
assimilate them with a photographic rendering of the original and digital is
associated with an increase in virtuality. So, when we speak of "digital facsimiles",
we are certainly looking for trouble. And yet we claim that, contrary to common
presuppositions, digital facsimiles are introducing many new twists into the
century old trajectory of works of art. There is nothing especially "virtual" in
digital techniques and actually there is nothing entirely digital in digital
computers either!6 The association of digitality with virtuality is entirely due to the
bad habits given by only one of its possible outputs: the pretty poor screen of our
computers. Things are entirely different when digital techniques are only one
moment in the move from one material entityVeronese' Nozze version n-1 in Le
Louvreto another equally material entityversion n +1 in San Giorgio. During
this time of mass tourism, increasingly vocal campaigns for the repatriation of
spoils of wars or commerce, when so many restorations are akin to iconoclasm,
when the sheer number of amateurs threaten to destroy even the sturdier pieces in
the best institutions, it does not require excessive foresight to maintain that digital
facsimiles offer a remarkable new handle to give to the notion of originality what is
Lowe, Adam, and Simon Schaffer. N01se, 2000. An Exhibition Held Simultaneously
at Kettles Yard, the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge, the
Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge and the Wellcome Institute,
London. Cambridge: Kettle's Yard, 2000; Smith, Brian Cantwell. Digital Abstraction and
Concrete Reality. In Impressiones, Calcografia Nacional, Madrid, 2003.
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required by the new time. Since all originals have to be reproduced anyway,
simply to survive, it is crucial to be able to discriminate between good and bad
reproductions.

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APPENDIX
The process used to create an accurate facsimile of Les Noces de
Cana by Paolo Caliari (called Vronse).
Adam Lowe
In the autumn of 2006, the Muse du Louvre reached an agreement with
Fondazione Giorgio Cini and granted Factum Arte access to record Veronese's
vast painting Les Noces De Cana. The conditions were carefully specified: the
recording must be completely non-contact, all equipment must meet the highest
conservation specifications and be approved prior to use in the museum, no
external lighting or scaffolding could be used, work could only happen when the
museum was closed and no equipment could be left in the room when the public
was present. In defining each condition the safety of the painting (and the other
paintings in the room) was always the decisive factor.
To record this 67.29 square meter painting at actual size and at the highest
possible resolution, Factum Arte built a non-contact colour scanning system that
uses a large format CCD and integrated LED lights. The scanning system records
at a scale of 1:1 at a maximum resolution of 1200 dpi. The scanning unit is
mounted onto a precision built telescopic mast, which is operated by an air-pump
and can accurately position the scanning unit on the vertical axis. It has a
maximum reach of 8 meters from the ground, is fitted with a linear guide to
position the scanning head in front of the painting, and has an ultra-sonic distance
sensor to ensure that the scanning head is a uniform distance from the painting
and is always positioned parallel to the picture surface. This is essential to ensure
that each file can be merged together without scale, focus or perspective
distortion. The scanning takes place at 8cm from the surface of the painting.
The scanning head moves over the surface illuminating the area that is
being recorded. LED light contains no ultraviolet rays and generates minimum
heat. The painting was scanned in 37 columns and 43 rows. Each capture was 22
x 30.5cm with an overlap 4cm on the horizontal dimension and 7cm on the
vertical dimension. Each file was saved in 2 formats (Tiff and Jpeg). The Tiff is
the working file and the Jpeg is a reference file. The recording was done at 600 dpi
with 16 bit depth of colour. During the recording of "Les Noces de Cana" 1,591
individual files were saved in Tiff format resulting in an archive of 400 gigabytes.
The telescopic mast was also used for conventional photography using a
Phase One H25 digital back fitted to a medium format Hasselblad body. The
Phase One records 5488x4145 pixels (22 megapixel) with a pixel size of 9x9
microns and 48 bit colour (16 bit per channel). The photography was done in 450
sections (18 columns and 25 rows) using the ambient light in the room. For
reference, a photograph of the complete painting was taken with the camera
positioned on a tripod in front of the Mona Lisa at the other end of the room
ensuring minimum distortion. The archive of photographic data consists of 593
different files totalling 41 gigabytes of data.
The lower part of the painting was recorded using a non-contact 3D
scanning system made by NUB 3D (Spain). No markers, spheres or registration

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systems are fixed to the object. The average working distance is about a meter
away from the surface being recorded. The NUB 3D Triple White Light Scanning
System uses a mix of optical technology, 3D topometry and digital image
processing to extract 3D coordinates from the surface of an object. This
technique, known as structured white light triangulation, produces accurate
measurements of the surface by analysing the deformation caused when lines and
patterns of light are projected onto the surface of an object. Multiple images are
captured by an integrated camera in the measuring head and using these images
the system's integrated technology calculates a co-ordinated X, Y, Z point cloud
relating to the surface of the object. About 10 sq meters of the painting were
recorded in 3D at a resolution of between 400 and 700 microns. The scanning
was done in sections of one meter square generating an archive of about 1
gigabyte. Due to the tonal difference of the surface and the varnish a multiexposure option was used. For the alignment and post processing Invometric
Polyworks software was used.
During the recording extensive colour notes were made using a series of
colour sticks made on site and matched to specific points on the surface of the
painting. These were fixed into a book containing a 1:1 scale line drawing of the
painting. A bit of the colour stick was cut off and fixed into the book at the
corresponding point on the painting.
The first task of assembling and aligning the data, carried out while
working in the Muse du Louvre was to pre-assemble all the columns using
Photoshop Scripting. This resulted in a roughly assembled image of the entire
painting. The final assembly, carried out in Madrid, was to reduce the 1,591
individual files into larger units accurately joined together. The vertical columns
were used as the basic unit and each scan was accurately assembled into strips
comprised of 8 or 9 scans. Each full column is made of 5 of these files. The file size
of each unit is about 1 gigabyte. 185 of these units make the whole painting (with
overlaps).
The edges of the painting were accurately assembled in order to give an
absolute reference. Three horizontal lines were established across the painting to
ensure no distortion was taking place. Four vertical lines were then stitched to
these horizontals and the resulting blocks were filled in the same way, sub-dividing
each one into horizontal and vertical areas. This avoided any compound
distortion and ensured an accurate master file. The master file was broken down
into manageable units (file size under 12 gigabytes) with an accurate reference to
each adjoining unit. Once these units were finalized the individual scans were
flattened. The painting was then divided into 1 x 2 meter blocks - these blocks are
the printing units. There are 44 printing units.
The scanner data and the colour photographic data have to be treated
independently but aligned in perfect registration. The photographic data
(recorded in 16 bit depth of colour per channel in RGB) has to be mapped onto
the basic scanner data unit of 1 x 2 meters. The scanner data contains no
distortion but the camera data always contains some lens and perspective
distortion. To join these two types of information, each photograph has to be
generally distorted and then locally transformed, using transparency in different

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blending modes depending on the nature of the data. This is mainly done using
features in the picture such as brush marks or 'noise' within the canvas.
When more than one data set is used, the usual difficulties of color printing
increase exponentially. The aim of the colour adjustments was to make Factum
Arte's flatbed printer match the colour sticks recorded in the Muse du Louvre.
The monitors were all calibrated to the colours that were being printed onto the
gesso coated canvas. The colour of the gesso is not a pure white so it was
important to create a range from the lightest white to the darkest black. The exact
matching of all the colours was then a question of trial and error involving
changes to both the digital files and the gesso mix. Printing began with the panel
at the bottom left of the painting and further changes were made until both the
tone and the colour of the two layers printed together matched the colour sticks
after the print had been varnished. Every change was archived and then simplified
gradually resulting in a series of Photoshop "actions". One set of actions was
applied to the Phase One data and another to the Cana Scanner data. Once
finalized, these actions were applied to all 44 printing files and small versions of
each file were printed. During the recording the lighting conditions for the
photography and the scanning were kept constant so these universal actions, in
theory, result in accurate colour matching across all parts of the 67 sq meter
canvas.
After printing the tests and comparing them with the colour sticks further
local corrections were made to specific colours that were not exact in terms of hue
and tone. This mainly applied to areas with a lot of whites or with complex greys
and blacks. These changes are made using locally applied masks to isolate specific
areas of the painting.
The facsimile was printed on Factum Artes purpose-built flatbed printer.
This is based on an Epson Pro 9600 digital printer. The printer uses pigment inks
in seven colours (cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, yellow, black and light
black). The bed is fixed and the print heads move up and down the bed on linear
guides. The movement of the heads is accurate to a few microns. The height of
the heads can be adjusted during printing. This enables the image to be printed
onto gesso coated canvas in pigment. The gesso coating uses no metal oxides and
is a mixture of animal glue, calcium carbonate and precipitated chalk. The texture
on the surface of the 16 oz. Irish Flax is made from flax fibres and threads mixed
with the gesso. Acetate sheets are printed with the Phase One H25 data and used
for the positioning of all the texture onto the surface of the canvas. Due to its
history "Les Noces de Cana" has a complex and unusual surface. To reproduce
this appearance, each piece of canvas is coated with a layer of animal glue, a layer
of gesso and fibres and then two layers of gesso. The acetate sheets are then used
with a pin registration system to accurately locate the print on the prepared
canvas. Each panel is printed twice in perfect register. The first layer to be printed
is the information recorded on the Phase One H25. The second layer is the
scanner data. The overprinting results in accurate colour matching and a control
of the tonal values of the painting. The entire image was divided into printing files
of 110 x 220. Each file has 10 cm of overlap. The printed panels are varnished
with a satin Golden acrylic varnish with UVLS (an ultra-violet filter).

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Ten 20mm thick Alucore panels were made. Each panel is 340 x 205.2 cm.
When perfectly aligned in two rows of five panels they make up the whole
painting. Each of the large aluminium panels is assembled from 6 printed panels
with some of the panel overlapping the edges. First the printed panels are laid out
on the surface and perfectly aligned. They are then spliced together with irregular
cuts that follow features in the painting. Straight lines are always avoided. The
canvas is then fixed to the aluminium with PVA. The joins resulting from the
stitching of the printed panels are then retouched by hand by a team of trained
conservators. The joins are first filled with a mixture of Golden acrylic moulding
paste and glass microspheres. When the join has been carefully filled it is first
tinted and then retouched using Golden acrylic paint. During this process a gloss
Golden varnish is used. A Golden gel is then used for the final texture and to
enhance selected brushmarks and areas of impasto paint. A final coat of satin
Golden varnish with UVLS is applied.
The honeycomb aluminium panels, with the retouched printing, were sent
to Venice in sections and then fixed on site to an aluminium frame. This was done
in two parts which were then lifted into place and fitted onto the wall. The final
filling, retouching and control of the surface was done when the facsimile was in
its final position and with the lighting that exists in the refectory.
See: www.factum-arte.com

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